LYNN – Charity drives are not unusual for St. Pius V Catholic grammar and middle school. But in this case the initiative came from one of the students.
“We have a student council, and every couple of weeks we have a meeting, and my mom helped me come up with the idea,” said 12-year-old Anya Vikhrau.
Vikhrau said she brought up the idea of the drive-in support of Ukraine at one of the council meetings and principal Paul Maestranzi said it was a good idea, Vikhrau said.
“It’s not unusual, we do drives like this, especially right before Thanksgiving, Christmas, and during the season of Lent,” said Maestranzi.
Maestranzi said those drives are usually a collaborative undertaking of the faculty, the parents, and the students.
The school already had a charity drive planned for that time span. It was called “Warm Hearts, Warm Homes,” which will help people with heating oil.
“And that was what we started with,” said Maestranzi. “But after the crisis in Ukraine broke out, we did decide that it might be a good idea to split this charity,”
Every class then got a little collection jar, and the student council encouraged the students to donate to the people who did not get to eat in the times of war in Ukraine.
Another jar was placed in the cafeteria, and the school did extra-collection in case kids had loose change “after they visited the snack bar,” Maestranzi said. The students were also doing the praying services in their classrooms.
The children managed to raise $1000, which were then split between “Warm Hearts, Warm Homes” and Ukraine. The principal said that Vikhrau was making some of the morning “announcements that we are doing this drive and she would speak a little bit of Russian” to the students.
Vikhrau said she was not on the student council, but she was helping with it, and that during the drive she joined the council for morning announcements to “tell them about the troubles that Ukraine has.”
“I hope that everything will turn out fine, so it won’t become a very big problem, and that everyone gets involved,” said Anya Vikhrau.
Vikhrau’s classmates were considerate of her, she said. After she spoke to them about “Soviet Union, and that everyone is a mix,” her classmates came up to her and asked her questions why the Ukrainians and the Russians sometimes shared the same language, and why the “cultures are a lot alike.”
“So they asked me a lot of questions because they didn’t fully understand what was going on until I explained to them,” said Vikhrau.
Vikhrau’s mother, Polina, said that she and her husband spoke to their daughter about what was going on in Ukraine, but they did not get into details, “as it was very hard, and especially for the kids,” according to Polina.
“We tried to explain to her that a lot of children lost their homes and their parents, and that we were fortunate. We wanted to make sure that she understood that not everyone had it, and that that was life, that a lot of things could happen,” said Polina Vikhrau.
Polina Vikhrau said that it was not the only event that she and her daughter participated in. For example, they also contributed hand-made candles to the Saugus yard sale and charity drive for Ukraine. It was Polina Vikhrau’s sister, who came up with the idea of candle making.
Along with the candles, the Vikhrau girls liked making bracelets, which they also made for several charity drives. They also participated in a pen pal program and sent letters to the kids in the orphanage in Uzhgorod, Ukraine, to try to entertain them a little.
“I think it’s really tragic what they are going through,” said Anya Vikhrau referring to the situation in Ukraine.
Oksana Kotkina can be reached at [email protected].
